Limited FTP Accounts with cPanel

If you have someone working on updates to your page content for you then you may wish to give them access to upload thiose updates directly to your web site. What you will not want to do in this instance is to give them access to your entire site control panel or FTP access to your entire account. Providing them with FTP access to just that specific folder within your account where the pages they are working on are stored should be quite sufficient for their needs in being able to update those pages while keeping them out of as much of the rest of your account as possible.

To do this using cPanel we need to use the FTP Accounts option to set them up their own FTP account that provides them with access just to the specific folder that they need access to. We can also impose a quota on their FTP account so that they can't upload more into the folder than the amount that we specify.

By doing this we limit the amount of damage that they can do to our account if it turns out that we were wrong to trust them to do the update. It is also better from their viewpoint because if something stuffs up elsewhere on your account while they are making the changes you both know that nothing that they could have done could possibly have impacted on that part of your account and therefore no possibility of groundless accusations being made against them.

Now all we need to do is to assign them a login name, a password, specify which folder they are to have access to, and allocate the quota in Megabytes. We then press the Create button and their FTP account will be created.

Now all that you need to do is to tell them what hostname, login name, and password to use in their choice of FTP programs in order to access the appropriate folder in your account. The login name and password they need to use are the ones you created in setting up the limited FTP account. The hostname will be the main domain name attached to your account.

Setting up a limited FTP account like this has several uses. One possible use is where you have a friend or family member where you have allocated them space on your account and set them up with their own add-on domain so that they can create their own site. You would provide them with FTP access to the folder for their domain so that they can look after the pages on their own site. Another use would be for providing temporary access to a web designer you have employed to make changes to the pages on one of your sites where you don't want them accessing or even knowing about whatever other sites you might have. This will work to provide such access to any sites you have set up using add-on domains. The only other site they will know you have is your main domain and they will not be able to access that. The only site where you may not be able to give access like this is your main domain if the hosting that you use doesn't allocate your main domain to its own folder by default and you didn't change the configuration before loading your main domain to put it in its own folder.